Breaking Point (4 page)

Gulls flew past. It was a great morning.

Of course it was a great morning. The test had gone so well he couldn't believe it. The Chinese had clamped down on it fast, squelching the incident into official silence deeper than that in a tomb, so there hadn't been any reports in the media, even in China. Maybe especially in China.

Morrison had his sources, though, and he found out quickly enough. The test had replicated the experiments with animals even better than anticipated. Well within the cutoff that separated "chronic" from "acute." It might not work on a battlefield with shifting troops, but the device would definitely work on a permanent settlement.

He'd known that it would. Well, to be absolutely honest, he had been
almost
certain. There was always the worry about field testing versus the lab. One never got over that. It took only a few failures to keep that anxiety alive forever, rather like Frankenstein's monster, shambling around in the dark looking for a friend.

Failure, unfortunately, had no friends. Which was how Dr. Patrick Reilly Morrison, with his Ph.D. in physics from MIT, had come to be involved with the project in the first place. He'd had a spectacular failure in his extremely low frequency experiments involving chimpanzees, and he'd lost his grant and funding big-time and damned fast. It was as if he had developed a sudden case of pneumonic plague--the first sneeze, and every professional contact he knew scattered as if they were parts of a bomb--
ka-blamm!
--leaving him stinking of smoke and failure and very much alone. No rat leaving a sinking ship had ever moved as fast as his grad students and research assistants had bailed on him, bastards and bitches, each and every one of them ...

He smiled at his own bitterness. Well, it really was an ill wind that blew no good, wasn't it? If the ELF simian protocols hadn't gone south on him, he'd never have gotten the job in Alaska, would he? And look where that had taken him. He could hardly be positioned better, could he?

Well, yes, he supposed,
academically
he could be. And certainly in pure scientific circles, with major universities begging him to come and present papers? Well, he was not at the top of that list. Ah, but if somebody just up and gave you five or six hundred million dollars, maybe more, to fund whatever research your heart desired, no strings, no oversight? Well, that would go a long, long way to assuage one's wounded ego, wouldn't it? People would kill for that kind of funding, and rightly so.

Money would get you through times of no Nobel better than a Nobel would get you through times of no money, that was the cold truth.

With half a billion in his pocket, he could thumb his nose at the journals, take his time to do whatever he damned well pleased, and when he was ready,
then
they'd come begging, by God! Because his theories did work after all, didn't they?

True, he didn't want to take the credit for it just now, given the mode and manner in which he had finally proved himself correct, but someday it would be his to claim. Perhaps he would hire the Goodyear blimp and have it fly back and forth across the country with lights flashing and blazing it out for all to see:

"I told you so!"

He looked at his watch. He would go home, spend the day with Shannon, then catch a plane back to SeaTac for the flight to Washington, D.C. After the second and third tests, the events would surely be public, and it was of primary importance that he be prepared for that. He was one of the sharper knives in the drawer, and he knew that it was not enough to be smart, you had to be clever as well. Smart, clever, a beautiful young wife who thought the sun rose and set in his shadow, and rich--he had it all but the last, and that was coming, a mere matter of a few weeks or months. When you got right down to it, how important was academic recognition compared to those? He
could fund
research if he wanted! Be a foundation unto himself!

Hah! Life was good--and it was about to get better.

Washington, D.C.

"We're going to Oregon," Tyrone Howard said. He grinned.

Nadine Harris, who at thirteen was the same age as Tyrone, returned his smile in a larger, white-against-chocolate version. "Exemplary, Tyrone. Congratulations!"

They were at the soccer field at their school, where they had gone to practice throwing boomerangs.

"No," he said,
"we
are going to Oregon. My dad, my mom, me, and
you."

She blinked at him. "What?"

"I asked if you could go. My parents said it was okay. We can both enter the tourney. I might even let you win."

She laughed.
"Let
me win? In your dreams, funny boy. Last I looked, my best hang time was seventeen seconds better than your best. Your 'rang comes down, you're packed up and halfway home before mine even apexes."

"That was
then,
honey chile, this is
now."
He waved his backpack.

"It came?" She knew right away what he was talking about. That was one of the things he liked about her. She wasn't the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was athletic, and she was very quick.

He nodded. "Yep. In this morning's mail."

"Lemme see, lemme see!" She reached for his backpack, and he quickly jerked it back.

"Hey, easy! I don't want you to damage it."

"I'll damage your head if you don't give it up right now!"

He laughed. From inside the backpack, he produced the object in question--a new boomerang.

And not just
any
boomerang, but a Larry Takahashi
KinuHa
--a Silk Leaf--a paxolin MTA L-Hook identical to the one that Jerry Prince had used to win maximum time aloft at the Internationals last year. It had cost him sixty-five dollars, plus insured shipping, and it came pre-tuned and ready to throw. Prince had spiraled his up at the Internationals in Sydney last summer and hung it for five minutes and sixteen seconds--with a thirty-klick-per-hour wind blowing. On a calm day, word was he could keep it in the air a whole lot longer, in practice anyway.

The boomerang was lightweight, thin, and flexible, made from layers of linen and glue, and colored a psychedelic electric blue with a black leaf stenciled on the long arm. The blue made it easier to spot if you missed a catch and it augered into the grass.

"Wow," Nadine said.

"So, are you going to come with us?"

She looked up from the 'rang. "I dunno. My mom planned to have me doing yard work this summer. Mowing the lawn, helping the old lady across the street with her garden, like that."

"It's not the whole summer, it's only three weeks. My mom said she'd talk to yours. C'mon, Nadine, how often are you going to get a chance to enter the Junior Nationals, if they aren't here in town?"

"Oh, I'll ask, 'cause I'd love to go. Oregon." She pronounced it "Ory-gone."

"My dad is borrowing an RV from somebody he knows," he said. "It'll be cheaper than staying in motels and eating out. It'll sleep like eight, and there's only four of us. Dad says we'll take five or six days to drive out, spend a week there, then a leisurely drive home. We'll get there like two days before the JN, have time to practice."

"It sounds great. Doesn't it rain all the time out there, though?"

"Nope. My dad goes out there in the winter sometimes for survival training. It's desert and snow and all on the eastern side of the state in the winter, but pretty green and sunny in Portland in the summer."

"They still have Indians out there, don't they?"

"Yeah, they own
casinos.
And the cowboys herd cattle in helicopters or riding on ATVs. It's the northwest, dummy, not Bali."

"You talk too much. Show me what you got." She waved at the new 'rang.

"No, you get to throw it first," he said.

"Really? No, I couldn't."

"Yeah, you can. Then I can beat you and make you feel bad."

"Hah. Gimme it."

He smiled as she took the new boomerang and headed out to where they had chalked a throwing circle. He sure did like her. She wasn't gorgeous like Belladonna Wright, and Nadine didn't make his heart race as Bella had done with a touch or a look, but he enjoyed being around her. She was somebody he could hang with, not exactly like a sister, but not somebody who stirred up his hormones too much, either. Outside of his pal Jimmy-Joe Hatfield, he didn't have any other close friends. And boy, she could throw.

He watched her limber up her arm and shoulder, drop some pixie dust to check the wind direction, then set herself for the throw.

The new boomerang whirled from her hand and soared, climbed steeply, twirling into the morning sunshine.
Man. Look at it go.

Chapter
4.

Friday, June 3rd

Quantico, Virginia

As he usually did when things got dicey in his personal life, Alex Michaels buried himself in work. Which was why he was at the office at nine P.M. on a Friday night, keeping busy. He scanned computer files, logged into reports annotated by his staff, and tried not to think about anything else.

Somebody was scamming old people by selling phantom retirement property from a website that appeared to be located in some kind of moving vehicle in south Florida.

Another third world country had joined the net, peddling drugs you couldn't buy without a prescription in the U.S., and for a third the cost.

Some hacker had broken into the Sears mainframe and was threatening to wipe all the memory clean if they didn't pay him half a million dollars.

It was the usual kind of thing that Net Force handled, and there seemed to be more and more of it coming their way every day.

It had been a long day. He noticed he was getting very stiff in his chair, hunched over the keyboard. He could operate his computer with his voice, of course, and voxax was as fast as he could do it manually--faster, even--but he'd never quite gotten used to dictating reports. He'd speak, the words would appear on the screen, and he could do it leaning back and comfortable, but it somehow didn't feel the same. Maybe they used different parts of the brain, keyboarding and speaking.

Or maybe he was just getting old and the future was passing him by ...

He thought about going down the hall to the gym and doing his
djurus.
Toni had been teaching him
pentjak silat
for six months, since after he'd almost been assassinated, and he officially knew four of the short forms. She'd started him with the simple ones from
Bukti,
but after he'd gotten two of those, she decided to skip over the rest and go right into the more complex
Serak
system.
Bukti
was pretty much a filter, she'd said, a perfectly good system of self-defense, but used to strain out casual students from the really serious ones. After you learned the eight
Bukti Negara
forms, then you were allowed to proceed--if you were lucky--into the parent art,
Serak.
Toni had decided he was serious enough, apparently. So he had already learned the first two from the mother art and had bagged practicing the others. This was pretty quick, she'd told him. Some teachers only showed students two or three
djurus
a year, and he had twice that in six months.

And Michaels already knew the third one, pretty much. He'd watched Toni enough to pick up the moves, though he didn't tell her that. So he was way ahead of the learning curve here.

Probably helped if you were working out every day. Not to mention sleeping with the teacher,
Michaels thought.

Though
that
wasn't happening anymore.

Shit. Let's not even go down this road again, okay? Either work out or get back to the computer, but don't sit here whining!

Yeah. I hear that.
The computer. He could practice his
silat
later.

He looked around. Most of his regular crew was gone, only the night shift was on. Gridley and Howard were on vacation, and Toni was in England.

Very quiet around here.

Saturday, June 4th

London

"Why all the secrecy?" Toni asked.

Carl smiled. "Come on, everybody likes pleasant surprises, don't they?"

"Well, not really. I know some people who wouldn't answer the door if somebody showed up on their porch with a check for a million dollars--not unless they had called first."

They were in a section of London that Toni didn't recognize, a fairly well-to-do neighborhood. They had passed Elephant's Castle, and she thought they were heading north and west, but she had gotten turned around during Carl's tour of interesting places.

He laughed as he downshifted the Morgan's manual transmission. He'd told her that the car, a classic from the fifties, spent most of its time in the shop, but that when it was running properly, he much enjoyed driving it. The problem with old British cars was that they only worked if they liked you. If you accidentally insulted one, it would pout, he said, and simply refuse to go until you had suffered enough.